Ice. One thing it does do is keep you honest. Don’t pay attention or respect it enough and you will fall. I fell.

Winter as I heard it described has finally started to descend on Ukraine. After an unusually warm start here I didn’t even need my heavier coat, snow has started to fall. My feelings on the topic are mixed; on one hand the now whitewashes just about everything and gives it a clean look. Ukraine isn’t known for its beauty in winter when there’s no snow. Summers are nice, but once most of the plants die off, the brown season isn’t all that pleasant. On the other hand it is cold and that makes travel a lot more treacherous. This is one time of year I am happy to let other people drive. I have no real desire to have to drive on ice-caked roads I know are not that good to start with.

It also means I need to get serious about buying a hat. I brought a hat with me to Ukraine, but Ira recently vetoed it, saying it was completely unstylish. I would dare say I in general am unstylish, but I don’t think she wanted to be seen in public with me wearing that hat. That’s my personal conclusion, not her words, but she did veto it. She may just be trying to give me some style. However, my attempts at getting her to just buy me a hat has been rebuffed, something about the need for me to try it on.

While my bare head isn’t bothering me too much yet, it is the rest of the country, as I am asked why I don’t have a hat or told I need one. I can’t hold them off forever. I finally broke down today and bought one, but not before I was told by a man while I was looking at hats I needed to buy one, was mistaken for a Polish person and told by the woman selling hats I needed one. This follows last night a woman at the school basically commanding me to go to the bazaar today and buy a hat. I’m glad everyone cares so much about the condition of my head.

As for the day-to-day activities, I spent the entirety of last week either in Kyiv or close to it as I worked on the volunteer newspaper and attended additional language training. To read the newspaper, direct your browser to pcukraine.org and follow some links in volunteer life to download a PDF version of the entire newspaper.

The language training was also useful, but especially this time I felt stronger coming into it, but felt even more humbled as some of the basic grammar things I struggled with. It does give me some extra fire to go back and focus my studies more. The other fun part is seeing all the other volunteers who I don’t see too often, hear the gossip and see who has stuck it out so far.

But as with everything else in my service those times ended faster than I expected and I am back at site, but am now starting up an ecological club to plan a tree-planting project in the spring. I sure feel useless a lot of the time, but at least I tend to find something or another to keep me busy.

I have been trying to get this typed up for weeks now and keep getting distracted, busy or a host of other rather lame excuses. But the basic idea is that Over about the past month I have been back in the states where I attended a wedding and visited home, came back to Ukraine and have had plenty of adventures along the way. What would have been digestible stories over time has basically merged into one massive tome I don’t want to dump on you all at once. So if you want to read anything more in depth, look into the supplemental materials section. Not that it isn’t a good story, I just think at the length it is now, it would be just too much.

Basic summary of it is I flew out of Warsaw back on Dec. 22, made it home finally on the 24 after a few days in Chicago. Flew out to Aaron Wirick’s wedding the 26th, which happened on the 30. Made it back to Oregon the 31st and was headed back to Ukraine the 6th of January. Didn’t actually make it back into the country until the 8th.

So there was my trip home, I felt like I was hardly there, or at least was so busy I hardly had time to realize where I was and end up not wanting to come back (I did want to come back to Ukraine).

Once I was back in the country, things have slowed down a little bit, I made it back while school was still on break and was able to celebrate Old New Year’s with my former host family here in Dobrotvir. School has started again now and that has put a bit more of a schedule to my life, although I am also trying to rearrange that schedule and it is being complicated due to the fact I am headed to Kyiv for the entire next week. One of the things that always amazes me is how fast times passes here. It is hard to believe that it is 2007 and January and I had hardly found out where I was going at this time last year. Yet here I am and conversing in a language I hardly knew about last year.

This promises to be an exciting year with plenty of new surprises and I am not sure what exactly will happen, but my main goal is to grow from it and help the community here grow as well. It will be my first full year here and I am hoping to take advantage of that. So wish me luck.

One of the most common questions I have received since returning is if I wanted to come back, or was at least happy at the thought of it. I have been able to honestly answer each of them with, yeah, I did want to come back, I have a full sense that there is more here I want to accomplish in my time here, which is slipping away faster than I would like. I think I can honestly say I have been happy with my decision to come here. There are bad days of course, and everything that has happened hasn’t always been pleasant, but for the most part it has been a good growing experience for me and a necessary step too. We’ll see where it takes me at the end of my two years here. That is starting to be another question I deal with alot, I can’t tell people for sure yet. The third question I get is if there was any snow while I was home. Weather here has been strange as there is not snow on the ground now, which is unusual for this time of year. Many people are having a hard time remembering the last time there was a Christmas with no snow on the ground, which happened this past year. So Happy New Year to all of you and best wishes as the year begins. I’ll try to get up those other recollections up as soon as I can.